About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Monday, February 11, 2013

`Such Peace Is the Best'

Using a
formula cobbled together and customized for me by a computational math student,
I’ve calculated that the plants in our yard, including four water oaks, two
loblolly pines and three sego palms, each year produce some 1,650 pounds of
biomass. That includes leaves, needles, cones, acorns, weeds, grass, sticks, bark,
mushrooms, lichens and moss, as well as the inedible citrus mutants that fall
from trees in the neighboring yard into ours. The old man, a benign Dr. Moreau,
has died but his legacy of lemons-grafted-on-grapefruit and tangerines-on-limes
lives on. The fruit is pulpy, seed-filled and bitter. If I were more ambitious
I might compost, but that’s too much work and I would prefer not to acquire a reputation
for being a composter. Instead, we fill flimsy biodegradable bags with yard waste
and leave them at the curb, where trash men throw them into a truck with the
other trash.

The motto
of the cult of wilderness is one of the silliest of the many silly things
written by Thoreau, a very great writer: “In Wildness [frequently
misquoted as wilderness]is the preservation of the world.” The source is his essay “Walking,”
written as a lecture in 1851 and published posthumously in 1862. Thoreau is
always at his best with particulars. Generalities bring out the priggish Yankee
blowhard in him. His contempt for ordinary people has something of the Bolshevik
about it. He no doubt would feel contempt for our little plot of well-tended
ground, which gives me enormous satisfaction. Civilization has evolved to give
me a house and yard in the middle of the fourth-largest city in the United
States, where I can co-exist happily with the natural world. In “Sunday Afternoon”
(Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986,
1995), a poem that might have been composed by a sober John Cheever, Timothy
Steele writes: